


Home in Bed with Your Best Friend

by grey_gazania



Series: This Girl Is Taking Bets [5]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: 616/MCU mashup, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/F, Genderswap, genderswap aLL THE THINGS
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:07:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28365144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grey_gazania/pseuds/grey_gazania
Summary: A collection of Natasha/fem!Bucky ficlets. Because I love BuckyNat and I love femslash, and by golly, I'm going to have them both at once.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Series: This Girl Is Taking Bets [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/556159
Kudos: 3





	1. Shower

The Winter Soldier was rinsing her hair in the shower, her back to the stall door, when, under the patter of the water, she heard the faint sound of someone manipulating the lock. Spinning around, she reached out and caught hold of the intruder’s wrist just as the stall door swung open.

“Still thinking you can sneak up on me, Natasha?” she said, smiling. “You’ll have to try harder than that.”

“All the more reason for me to keep practicing,” the Black Widow said. She pulled free from the soldier’s grip, locked the door behind her, and let the towel wrapped around her waist drop to the floor. Then she advanced and caught the soldier by the hips, pushing her against the tiled wall and kissing her hungrily.  
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“You were away for weeks,” Natasha murmured after a moment, her lips brushing against the soldier’s as she spoke. “I missed you.”

“It was a complicated mission,” the soldier said, pulling Natasha closer.

They shouldn’t be doing this. The soldier knew it, knew that they would be punished if they were caught, but she didn’t care. As long as they kept their voices low, the running water would mask any sound they made, and most of the men who ran Department X seemed oblivious to the possibility that two women might be more than comrades.

She shivered as Natasha trailed her fingertips over her wet skin, lightly tracing the long, faded scar that ran down the soldier’s torso, reaching from her breastbone to her pelvis. It was one of the oldest of her scars, older even than the incisions from her sterilization, old enough that she suspected it predated her time with the Department. Sometime in her past, someone had cut her open. But she couldn’t remember who, or when, or why.

Still, she didn’t dwell on those questions – not here, not now, not with their mouths locked together and Natasha’s body pressed against hers.

“Strong Natasha,” she whispered, when they broke apart for breath. “Powerful Natasha.”

Natasha pressed her face into the crook of the soldier’s neck, smiling against her skin. The water sprayed over them, droplets clinging to their hair, and the women melted together like ice in a spring thaw.


	2. Nameless

“Soldier?” Natasha murmured, reaching over and gently carding her fingers through the Winter Soldier’s dark curls.

The Winter Soldier didn’t open her eyes, but she acknowledged Natasha with a soft hum. They were facing one another in the small hotel bed, their legs tangled together and their hair spilling onto each other’s pillows. The soldier’s metal arm was draped across Natasha’s waist, and she was filled with a rare feeling of contentment.

It was getting harder to find time to be together like this. They couldn’t risk it inside the facility; within those walls, General Karpov had eyes everywhere. And lately their superiors had been sending them on separate missions, using them to train less experienced agents rather than having them work with each other. It had been weeks since the women had last exchanged anything more intimate than a smile, and they’d taken eager advantage of the opportunity presented by this assignment.

“What is it?” the soldier asked, tilting her head into Natasha’s touch.

“I still don’t know your name,” Natasha whispered. “No one ever calls you by it.”

It was a dangerous thing for Natasha to say, and the Winter Soldier suspected that she never would have dared if she hadn’t been certain that they weren’t being recorded. But the pair of them had swept the hotel room themselves, and they knew it wasn’t bugged. Still, she hesitated for a long moment before answering. If they were being watched…

No. She couldn’t think like that, or she would terrify herself into never touching Natasha again, and that would be unbearable.

“I don’t have a name,” she finally said, her voice very quiet.

She was aware that her situation was unusual. In fact, apart from herself, she couldn’t think of a single person in Department X who was truly nameless. There were other people who were called solely by their code names, but even they still had names. Everyone knew that Omega Red was Arkady Rossovich, and that Titanium Man was Boris Bullski, even if no one actually addressed them that way.

And everyone knew that the Black Widow was Natalia Romanova.

From what the soldier could see of Natasha’s face in the darkness, her lover was surprised by her answer.

“Everyone has a name,” Natasha said. “Even if no one uses it anymore, your parents must have called you _something_.”

The soldier shook her head. “I don’t have parents, either,” she said. “The American did, but I don’t.”

”What American?”

She removed her arm from Natasha’s waist and rolled onto her back. Staring up at the ceiling, she said, “There was a woman. An American woman. But she was too weak to be of use. So the General broke her. Then he took the pieces that were worth saving and used them to make me. She was the source; I’m the result. I’m an improvement, the General says.”

If the words had a stiff, learned-by-rote quality, that was because they had been drilled into her by way of pain. She knew that she had come to the Soviet Union as an adult, but she remembered nothing of her life before that time. Even parts of the recent past were blank; she belonged to Department X, and that meant that she remembered only what General Karpov wished her to remember. If stray memories belonging to the American did surface, her orders were to report them to Dr. Rodchenko for removal. For the most part, she complied.

Still staring at the ceiling, she felt Natasha’s light touch on her cheek.

“Did the American have a name?” Natasha asked.

The Winter Soldier shrugged. “Probably, but I don’t know it. Besides–” She paused, turning onto her side to look at Natasha once more, and said, “I’m not her, and she wasn’t me. She’s dead. Her name isn’t important.”

She could see Natasha searching her face, surely seeking a clue as to whether the Winter Soldier believed her own words. The soldier kept her expression carefully blank. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Natasha. It was simply that she couldn’t allow herself to openly doubt what she had been told by her superiors.

Doubt was dangerous. In Department X, doubt would get you killed.

Shifting her weight on the mattress, the soldier returned her hand to its former place on Natasha’s waist. It was always the metal hand; lying on her prosthetic for any length of time caused painful cramps in her shoulder, so she always took the right side of the bed. Still, she missed feeling the warmth and softness of Natasha’s skin against her own.

”Does it really matter what you call me?” she asked.

A car passed by the hotel, its headlights briefly shining through a gap in the blinds and illuminating a strip of Natasha’s face. She looked…sad, almost, and she said, “It just doesn’t feel right, only ever calling you ‘soldier’.”

”It’s all I’ve got,” the soldier said. “Unless you want to call me Winter Soldier?”

She knew that Natasha wouldn’t do that, just like the soldier herself would never call Natasha ‘Black Widow’ while they were in bed together. Those were code names. They had no place here in the intimate dark.

”You’re being difficult,” Natasha complained, and the soldier saw in another flash of headlights that she was frowning.

”I’m sorry,” the soldier said, easing her hand down to caress Natasha’s hip. “But I’m telling the truth: I don’t have a name. It’s just the way it is.”

_Weapons don’t have names_ , she would have said once. _Names are for people_. She knew – had always known – which category Department X considered her a part of, and she had accepted their judgement as fact.

Until now.

The trouble was that, lying here with Natasha in her arms, she didn’t feel like a weapon anymore. A weapon wouldn’t be able to love the woman who was curled up beside her. A weapon wouldn’t desire Natasha’s lips against hers, or her hands on her skin. A weapon wouldn’t wish, in the most secret part of her heart, that she and Natasha could flee across the Iron Curtain and escape the General’s grasp forever.

A person, though. A person would.

The Winter Soldier didn’t like these thoughts. They unsettled her and made her want to question all the things she had been told. But questions, like doubt, would earn her nothing more than a bullet to the brain. General Karpov had no use for agents who thought for themselves.

”Let it go,” she said, as much to herself as to Natasha. “It’s not important.”

She could see that Natasha still looked troubled, so she tipped her head forward and caught her in a kiss. Natasha responded eagerly, her lips parting beneath the soldier’s own, and the soldier trailed her fingers down Natasha’s hip, seeking the warmth between her lover’s thighs.

She didn’t have a name, but she could at least have this.


	3. A Stolen Moment

In a training room in the complex in Moscow, the Winter Soldier was enduring a long dressing-down from her handler. During that morning's sparring session, she had failed to sufficiently check her strength. Now Comrade Egorova was in the med bay with fractured ribs and a broken arm, and a very angry Dmitri was giving his soldier a heated lecture in proper sparring behavior. 

In truth, she was only half-listening to Dmitri's words. She had been distracted and on edge for days, ever since the disaster of her last mission. What had seemed to be a simple assassination on paper had gone sideways from the beginning, and though the target had been successfully eliminated, the cost had been high.

Dmitri's voice seemed to fade out entirely as the Winter Soldier was engulfed once more by the memory of her last sight of the Black Widow. Natasha -- strong, intelligent, deadly Natasha -- had been sprawled on a stretcher, covered in blood. Two medics were bending over her. _I can't find a pulse_ , one had said, and the soldier's heart had frozen in her chest. But she hadn't been able to follow Natasha into medical, because she'd immediately been pulled aside to give the General her report.

No one had spoken of Natasha since. Dead agents didn't get funerals; they simply vanished, never to be mentioned again except as object lessons in how not to fail. And every time the Winter Soldier thought of her, she felt as though she was being torn open from the inside out.

She was brought back to the present by a slap -- not one intended to hurt, but one intended to get her attention.

"Are you even listening to me, soldier?" Dmitri demanded.

"Yes, sir," she said automatically.

He answered her words with a doubtful snort. "You aren't," he said. "You've had your head in the clouds ever since you returned from Şirvan. No one blames you for what happened there, but if you continue to injure your fellow agents, the General will have to hear of it, and then you _will_ be in trouble."

Frowning, she looked down and away from him, fixing her eyes on the floor. "I dislike losing my teammates, sir," she said quietly. "Especially teammates whom I helped train."

Dmitri was silent for a moment, and when she risked a glance up at him, she saw an odd, unreadable expression on his face.

"Did no one tell you?" he asked. "The Black Widow isn't dead, soldier."

The soldier gaped openly. "She's alive?"

Dmitri nodded. "She's going to be in medical for at least another week, but she's recovering," he said. That odd expression flickered across his face once more, and he stepped closer to the Winter Soldier. "Meet me outside the dining hall tonight, at 22:30," he said quietly. "I'll get you in to see her. But you have to do better in training from now on. Do you understand, soldier?"

"Yes, sir," she said. "22:30. I'll be there."

* * *

Natasha was in the bed nearest the door, asleep. Bandages were visible beneath her gown, and a cannula was delivering oxygen to her nose. Her unwashed hair was lank against the pillow, and grey half-moons shadowed her closed eyes.  


The soldier squatted down beside the cot, ignoring Dmitri as he hovered in the doorway. At first she simply looked at Natasha, torn between relief and concern. Her lover had survived. She was alive. But she looked worn and tired -- exhausted, really -- and the soldier knew from experience that she was likely in a lot of pain. Agents who were injured were assumed to have erred, and agents who had erred weren’t given painkillers. The Department punished them by letting them suffer.  


Gently, she reached out and took Natasha’s hand, twining their fingers together as she watched the slow rise and fall of the Black Widow’s chest. For a moment, all was silent. Then there was a hitch in Natasha’s breathing, and she blinked her eyes open, staring muzzily at the soldier’s face.  


“Soldier?” she whispered, her voice hoarse and thick with sleep.

“Shh,” the soldier said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.” She wanted to reach out, to kiss Natasha's forehead or touch her cheek, but she knew they were being watched.

They were always being watched.

“The doctors let you in to see me?” Natasha mumbled, still looking at her in bleary confusion.

The soldier shook her head. “My handler,” she said, very quietly. “Just for a few minutes." She could see Natasha’s eyelids beginning to droop, so she added, “Sleep. You need rest. I just-- I thought you were dead. I thought those bodyguards had killed you. I had to see that I was wrong.”

“Not dead,” Natasha whispered.  


Behind them, Dmitri suddenly spoke. "Soldier," he said, looking at his watch, "your time is up. The doctor will be back soon."

Natasha flinched a little when he spoke, and the soldier gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "Rest," she said again. "I'll see you when you recover."

She didn't say _I love you_ , but she hoped Natasha heard it all the same.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could write an essay about Dmitri (the Winter Soldier's handler in _Captain America and Bucky: The Life Story of Bucky Barnes_ ) and that fact that he keeps the relationship between the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow a secret until he feels that it's beginning to compromise the Winter Soldier's programming.


End file.
